To find an empty, neatly made-up bed.
I walked to the side of the bed, my eyes and brain taking a quick inventory. The narrow cabinet that had held a change of clothing was empty. So was the under-bed shelf where she’d kept her reader and music headphones.
I turned around to find Bayta standing just inside the doorway, her eyes wide. “Frank—”
“Come on,” I said, taking her hand and heading back into the hallway. I nearly ran down the same Filly tech along the way and brought us to a halt in front of the receptionist. “Where is she?” I asked shortly.
The Filly gave me a quizzical look. {Who?}
“The Human girl, Terese German,” I said, striving to keep my voice civil. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation. “She’s gone. Where did they take her?”
The receptionist dropped her gaze to her computer display and punched a few keys on her board. {Terese German was checked out an hour and twenty minutes ago,} she reported. {Her condition had worsened, and her doctors decided to move her to an intensive-care facility.}
I clenched my teeth. An hour twenty would put it right after Bayta and Minnario had left. Also right after Aronobal had discovered that two of the gimmicked hypos were missing. “Which one?” I asked. “One of the other buildings here in the dome?”
{No,} the receptionist said, her blaze paling a little in confusion as she peered at the screen. {She’s not here.}
“Then where?”
{I don’t know,} she admitted, still studying her screen. {The location should be listed. But the reference point is blank.}
I looked at Bayta’s ashen face. She’d been right. The Shonkla-raa had indeed wanted to keep us away from Terese.
And now they’d succeeded.
ELEVEN
“You must try to calm down, Mr. Compton,” Captain of the Guard Lyarrom said in probably the closest he could get to a soothing voice. “We are doing our best to locate your friend.”
I looked at Bayta, who was sitting in a corner of the security nexus, her face rigid with her efforts to hide her emotions. I looked at Emikai, whom I’d summoned back from Minnario’s room and who was now standing stiffly beside her. “I appreciate your words of concern, Guard Captain Lyarrom,” I said. “You’ll forgive my impertinence if I say that’s not good enough.”
“One’s best is all that one can do,” he said in a sage, grandfatherly way.
“Then maybe it’s time to bring in more people and add their best to the mix,” I countered. “For starters, you could start a trace on Dr. Aronobal’s comm—chances are she’s still with Ms. German. You could bring in patrollers from other parts of Proteus and get them started on a room-by-room search, starting with her quarters—”
“Ms. German’s quarters have already been searched,” he put in. “There is nothing of any help to us there.”
“—and finally, if you can’t or won’t get through the bureaucratic inertia,” I concluded, “I suggest you bring in Chinzro Hchchu to streamline things.”
Lyarrom’s face had grown stiffer, and his blaze darker, with each suggestion. “Mr. Compton, you are seriously overreacting,” he said stiffly. “There is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in this matter. Nor is there any evidence that Dr. Aronobal is in danger, impaired, or engaged in criminal behavior, which are the legal requirements for activating her comm’s tracker. Finally—”
“So get Chinzro Hchchu in here to override those requirements.”
“Finally, your verbal contract regarding Ms. German’s safety ended when she came aboard Kuzyatru Station,” Lyarrom said, raising his volume. “As to your final suggestion, I am not going to call in Kuzyatru Station’s assistant director to deal with a bookkeeping error.”
I took a careful breath, fighting back the urge to punch the complacent idiot in his snout. “Fine,” I said between clenched teeth. “You just stay inside your nice, comfortable guidelines and limitations. When dead bodies start showing up, don’t blame me.”
Without waiting for a reply I stalked over to Bayta and Emikai. “You okay?” I asked Bayta quietly.
“I shouldn’t have left her,” Bayta murmured, her voice on the edge of tears. “I should have just sent Minnario when you called and stayed with her.”
I grimaced. Minnario. If the Nemut hadn’t pulled his own vanishing act that first night, it might have been easier to convince Lyarrom that Terese’s disappearance was something more serious than a bureaucratic glitch. But then, that had hardly been Minnario’s fault.
Nor was Terese’s disappearance Bayta’s. “You had no way of knowing,” I reminded her.
“Didn’t I?” Bayta countered darkly. “I knew Dr. Aronobal knew about the missing hypos. I should have guessed she and the others wouldn’t just leave things the way they were.”
“And what exactly would you have done to stop them?” I shot back, more harshly than I’d intended. I should have anticipated this, too. Even more than Bayta should have. “In fact, I’d go so far to say that, under the circumstances, I’m just as glad you weren’t in their way when they decided to move her. Who knows what they would have done to you?”
“I’m not as helpless as everyone thinks,” she said stiffly. She sighed and lowered her eyes. “But you’re probably right.”
Which wasn’t to say that I was right, or that she believed I was right, or that any of my soothing logic was making her feel better. “Regardless, what’s past is past,” I said. “We need to focus on finding her and getting her back.”
“Right.” Bayta took a deep breath. “What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to our room and start figuring out who Blue One is,” I told her. “If and when you finish with that, start making a list of all medical facilities in this part of Proteus—yes, I know there are a lot of them, but we have to start somewhere. Logra Emikai, would you escort her back to the room?”
“Of course,” Emikai said, his voice dark and grim. His contract to keep Terese safe had ended, too, but that clearly wasn’t making any more difference to him than it was to me. “What will you do?”
I looked over at the Jumpsuits poring over their controls in front of their fancy monitor banks. Fat lot of good any of it, or any of them, had done us. “I’m going to have a word with my attorney,” I said. “Watch yourselves. Both of you.”
* * *
Minnario was understandably surprised to see me. [I thought you would be at least another hour,] he said, wiping his mouth with a cloth as he backed his chair out of the doorway to let me in. [Forgive me—I’d just brought in my dinner.]
“No problem,” I assured him, looking over at the couch. Blue One didn’t seem to have moved. “You left him alone?”
[The restaurants don’t deliver,] he reminded me. [But I checked his restraints before I left, and I was gone less than fifteen minutes. May I offer you something?]
“No, thank you,” I said, walking over to the couch and reaching around behind the Filly. The quick-locks were still securely in place. “Please go ahead with your meal,” I added as I pulled over the computer desk chair and sat down facing the prisoner. “Just pretend I’m not here.”
Among the Human diplomats I’d escorted during my early days in Westali, Nemuti were considered fairly low on the list of desirable dinner companions. The species in general tended to chomp their food, and their truncated-cone-shaped mouths added an odd echo effect to the sound of their mastication. The additional distortion of Minnario’s mouth, I quickly discovered, greatly enhanced the overall effect.